Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"It might be a couple of weeks before the rains start. In the meantime, we'll build a real house, a watertight one, and get those seeds ready for planting."

As soon as the new hut was underway, April got sick, then Clover, then Jerry, then Mother. It was the squitters, but they also turned pale and ran a high fever. They lay under the pipanto and groaned and made dashes to the latrine. Mother said it was all the travel and banging around and our diet, which was wild manioc and fish, and the carkles and whelks that we dug out of the mud.

"If it's the food, how come Charlie's not sick?" Father said. "Or if it's the hard work, why aren't I flat on my back?"

"How dare you accuse us of faking!" Mother said.

"Just asking."

"Don't bully us, Allie!"

Father went silent. It was scary, hearing them argue in the stillness of this gray lagoon, but their silence was worse. For two days they did not speak to each other, and, because of it, all we kids did was whisper.

Mother recovered, yet she was still weak. Father said, "The invalids can deal with the seeds," and they stripped the Miskito's vegetables and corn and dried the seeds while Father and I gathered material for the hut.

We had found an abandoned dugout. We patched it and caulked its cracks. "Some fool threw this away — it's a perfectly good boat!" We made daily trips down the creek and to Brewer's to gather driftwood — beams and planks that had floated through the coastal inlet and washed ashore. We found them stuck against the mud banks. Most of this wood had nails and screws in it. We removed these and once they were straightened used them for fastening the foundation of the hut. And beachcombing, harvesting what the tides deposited, gave us other treasures.

On the coast, all huts were belfries on stilts. Not Father's. His was like a small barge, the tublike foundation resting against the bank. He took great care to make it waterproof, tarring its cracks and then hammering strips of tin on it to seal it from rats and moisture. This barge-hut was bigger than a pipanto, but it was pipanto-shaped at its base.

A Zambu passed by one day. He did not see us until Father called him over. His face looked punched, but he wore a clean yellow shirt and a straw hat. His name was Childers. He was going to church. It was Sunday, he said.

Father said, "I wish you hadn't told me that."

Childers's laugh was mainly fright.

Father said, "If God hadn't rested on the seventh day, He might have finished the job. Ever think of that?"

Childers said, "You putting up a bodge there?"

"It's a house."

"Look like a bodge. Or a lanch."

It did — a roofed boat on the mud bank overlooking Laguna Miskita.

"When the rains come, I'm going to be dry as a nut. Think about it."

The Zambu considered this, then laughed again in his gagging way while Father faced him.

The difference between the two men surprised and scared me. The Zambu in his yellow shirt and straw hat and walking stick, and Father, tall and bony and red, with long greasy hair and a beard and wild eyes and a missing finger and sailcloth shorts. Father was skinnier than the Zambu! And I had not noticed until now just how wild looking he was. If you didn't know better, you would have thought he was the savage, and not the Zambu. If the Zambu had had hair and eyes like that I would have run for my life. But we had gotten used to Father looking like a live scarecrow, the wild man of the woods, and hollering.

Worry was making the Zambu chuckle as Father scampered around the hut, pointing out its advantages.

Notice how practical it was, he said. No poles, so it wouldn't shake down in an earthquake. No amount of rain could penetrate the tarred roof. It was made from the wreckage of ships that had foundered off the Mosquito Coast — each timber had been sealed and smoothed by the ocean. Two long cabins, adults and children, each with its own entrance. It had everything — privacy, strength, and grace. It would be standing here, Father said, long after all the palm-leaf shanties had been blown away by the summer storms.

"I want some bad storms, so I can prove I'm right. Then I'll curl up inside and laugh my head off. Thick walls keep it cool, and we get a breeze from end to end through the hatchway between the cabins. Plus, I can jack up the roof. I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you this."

Childers said, "Me roof ain't leak."

"We'll see. But frankly that's the big mistake you people make around here. Always talking about your roof, always concentrating on your top. What about your bottom?"

Childers had started to back away.

"Your bottom's just as important. You can't eliminate the problem by sticking your house on poles and sending it ten feet in the air. That only compounds it — makes you vulnerable, conspicuous, and temporary. Look at what happened in the States!"

Father's lecture had taken the Zambu by surprise. He did not reply. He was still walking backward along the muddy shore.

"This house is leakproof, top and bottom," Father said. "Is yours? Is your bottom leakproof?"

Now the Zambu saw Mother and the twins separating the seeds into piles. He tipped his hat in old-fashioned politeness.

"How is it, Ma?"

"Don't trample my garden," Father said.

The Zambu looked down. There was no garden. He tiptoed up the bank, crossing imaginary furrows.

"Now you're messing up my chicken run!"

The Zambu didn't see it. There was no chicken run. But he picked up his feet and framed his arms and frowned with fear, as if an invisible chicken run stood in his way.

"Remember this. Experience isn't an accident. It's a reward that's given to people who pursue it. That's a deliberate act, and it's hard work. You choose to go to church — funny place to go, considering the state of the world and how it got that way. On the seventh day, God left the room — why should you make the same lazy mistake? Why pray when you could be making a hut like this?"

"Got no tools." The Zambu was panicky. He started to run.

Father followed him, shouting.

"I don't have tools. Everything you see here I made with my own two hands!"

But the Zambu was gone. He disappeared along the creek bank in Brewer's direction. He could not have heard what Father said. It was just as well, because what Father had told him about the tools was untrue.

Father said, "I dislike that man for his malevolent curiosity."

We went back to work. Father had denied we had tools. It was a lie, another invention. It comforted him.

We had tools, and more than tools. The Mosquito shore provided us with most of the things we needed. We had found the head of a claw hammer on the beach and fitted it with a handle. By pounding the tips of heated spikes we had made screwdrivers and chisels. A rusty saw blade we had seen lying in seaweed was now gleaming from use. We retrieved wire and tin and bottles from the tide wrack, and torn nets that we patched, and enough sailcloth for Mother to make shorts for us all and a smock for herself. Her needles were bird bones. She could have had real needles from Brewer's Village, but Father liked the idea of killing birds ("Scavengers!") and sharpening their bones to make needles.

Beachcombing was dirty, exhausting work. Nearly every day during those early weeks at Laguna Miskita, in the crackling bat-haunted darkness before dawn, we took the dugout down the creek and across Brewer's to a shanty village called Mocobila. Just west of there, before the Zambus were awake, we searched the beach for usable items. We walked abreast, Father and I — and when they were well enough, the twins and Jerry joined us — picking through the tightly knotted mass of wood and rope and seaweed that had been deposited by the night tide.

We found more fishing tackle than we could ever use, and rope and rags and plastic jugs, and lumps of tar, and oars and canoe paddles and cooking pots and skillets. One day we found a six-foot ladder, and on two successive days toilet seats.